Prayer, a Twig, and a Goose Named Seema

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Come to think of it ....... i always hated it when my parents were always praising other kids in front of me. Eventually i ended up resenting those perfect kids(who were not so perfect i later realized).In the presence of such wonder kids i could never do anything right.

`Payer continued, “…and in the darkness, I realized that I had to think something quickly. But it was hard, so the more I thought about light the more I missed it ...```

This was the only part that made some sense to me ....... the rest ........ZILCH

P.S Since i spent quite some time reading and trying to analyze it, i would really appreciate it if the author or maybe Godot would explain it.

Reply #: 5 MocK|ngByrd

!!!!!!!!!nakarrrr!

(...hope you don`t mind Inkling...)



RAMBLINGS:


...recently mentioned an essay I had read long ago called The Onion Eater...a visitor to chowk wrote to me...” your onion eaters was intriguing so i went to look for it ... i found tavis mcdonald`s essay `the onion eaters` which was published in a lit. journal called `prairie fire` ... would that be the one ...”

...wrote to www.prairiefire.mb.ca/...and got back a prompt response from Heidi Harms....” I`m afraid I can`t help you regarding an essay by Travis Mcdonald. Intriguingly, though, the spring 1997 edition of Prairie Fire contains a poem called ``The Onion Eater`` by Tanis MacDonald.”...

...back to search engines....found out a possible suspect...Hillaire Belloc....
Belloc, Hilaire, (Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc) 1870–1953

...a site devoted exclusively to him said...” Catholic author Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was one of the most prolific and thought-provoking writers of his age. Well known to many for his literary collaboration and close friendship with G.K. Chesterton, Belloc continues to fascinate, both as a prescient social commentator and a master of finely crafted prose and verse...” ...he has authored over 150 books, essays, poems etc...spent a long time but was unsuccessful in locating the Onion Eater..


[..some quotations...

``When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
`His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.```

“The grace of God is courtesy.” ]

...moving along...somehow stumbled across... Observations on Eliot`s ``love song``—and its unlikely leading man by Christopher Ricks... in the current Atlantic... in which he mentions a poem by Rudyard Kipling called The Love Song of Har Dyal....(“ Eliot was to say, years later, that he would never have given his poem its title had it not been for a very different, exotic-erotic poem by Rudyard Kipling called ``The Love Song of Har Dyal.``)...

...intrigued...I started looking for Har Dyal... first found the poem....and later the story....Beyond the Pale...they are all here...the search for the Onion Eater continues...:)


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T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock


S`io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s`i`odo il vero,
Senza tema d`infamia ti rispondo.


LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question... 10
Oh, do not ask, ``What is it?``
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 15
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 20
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; 25
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go 35
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ``Do I dare?`` and, ``Do I dare?``
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— 40
[They will say: ``How his hair is growing thin!``]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: ``But how his arms and legs are thin!``]
Do I dare 45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all— 55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress 65
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! 75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here`s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 85
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while, 90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ``I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all``— 95
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ``That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.``

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while, 100
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: 105
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
``That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.`` 110
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use, 115
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old... 120
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me. 125

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.



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Atlantic Unbound | April 11, 2001

Poetry Pages

``Prufrock, J. Alfred Prufrock``

Observations on Eliot`s ``love song``—and its unlikely leading man

by Christopher Ricks

.....


There has never been its equal, as the very first poem in a poet`s first book of poems.

In 1917 the Egoist Press offered—price, one shilling—what the advertisement called ``a small book of Poems`` by Mr. T. S. Eliot, with the intriguing (indeed, incomprehensible) title, Prufrock and Other Observations. And there, at the head of the book, was the poem that heads modern, not just Modernist, poetry: ``The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.`` Eliot had leapt into possession of his means and of his ends.

Eliot had conceived the poem in 1910, when he was twenty-one, and had drafted it in the summer of 1911. In 1914, Ezra Pound, who was only gradually becoming Eliot`s friend and whose poetry Eliot did not—at this stage—think much of, was elated by Eliot`s mastery and mystery. Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, the editor of the magazine Poetry:
I was jolly well right about Eliot. He has sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American. PRAY GOD IT BE NOT A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS. He has taken it back to get it ready for the press and you shall have it in a few days.

He is the only American I know of who has made what I can call adequate preparation for writing. He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own.
Next year, the poem appeared in Poetry. Two years after that, it launched Prufrock and Other Observations. The rest is history, or rather is anything but.

Literature is news that stays news. So said Pound. And literature is the new that stays new. Eliot was soon to proclaim, in the essay ``Tradition and the Individual Talent,`` that ``The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.`` ``The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock`` was and is the really new.

The questions about it, though, are the good old ones. For instance, what kind of poem is it? How are we to get our bearings? It tells a story, in a way, but in a very roundabout way. Or you can hear it as a dramatic monologue, albeit of a cryptic kind, inheriting much from Tennyson and from Browning but with a silent interlocutor only there in the shadows, if at all. Then again, it is (oddly enough) a love song of a sort, though of an eerie sort. Eliot was to say, years later, that he would never have given his poem its title had it not been for a very different, exotic-erotic poem by Rudyard Kipling called ``The Love Song of Har Dyal.`` What is so poignant in Eliot`s love song is its chill, its unfulfilled yearning for love, for a love. It is not only the mermaids within the poem of whom the voice in the poem might say, with flat-tongued dismay and courage, ``I do not think that they will sing to me.``

Or another good old question: Who are ``you and I``? ``Let us go then, you and I``—and immediately we are to go with, to go along with, something at once direct and elusive. Is the voice within the poem speaking to another, and if so, to whom? The poem`s title will prompt us to suppose that ``you`` is the loved one, the one at least hoped for in love, as a lover. But who will that turn out to be? Is it the ``one`` of the repeated yet modified lines ``If one, settling a pillow by her head,`` and ``If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl``? Is the opening ``you`` this later unopened ``she``?

Or is the voice speaking to itself, the ``you`` with which we sometimes ruefully address ourselves? (What are you going to do about that, then?) Or is the voice speaking to someone out there imagined as perennially sympathetic, the gentle reader in due course perhaps, or that listener who really understands you and your needs, for whom you can spend your life waiting?

Such questions raise themselves, and then courteously decline to be answered, or at least to be answered once and for all. ``The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock`` is the voice of someone (not ``the poet`` but the voice that the poet has called into being) who cannot bear the thought of ``once and for all.`` Not that the opposite thought is any more comforting, the thought that,
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
Each of us as a reader will have his or her give-and-take with the poem, a poem so endlessly provocative and rewarding, unsettled and unsettling. For me, a while ago, writing in a book that was published in 1988 on the centenary of Eliot`s birth, the tacking approach was through the notoriously perilous and swirling waters of prejudice. Who, for instance, is Prufrock, he who so commands the poem and whose name appears not once in the body of the poem but only (only?) at its head? ``The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock``: back in 1917, then, before ever you entered upon reading a line of poetry by T. S. Eliot, you were met by a crystalline air thick with prejudice. (Not the prejudice that has come to dominate so much later consideration of Eliot, anti-Semitism.) Of course a man cannot be blamed for his name, for being called Prufrock. But the name does have comical possibilities, given not only the play of ``frock`` against ``pru`` (prudent, prudish, prurient) but the play of this division against the ``proof/rock`` possibility. A man with this name might be well advised to call himself John A. Prufrock rather than be so orotund. And then again, if he insists on plumping for the form ``J. Alfred Prufrock,`` he had better not expect the words ``the love song of`` to sit happily in his immediate vicinity—love song as against, say, tax returns. ``I`m in love.`` ``Who`s the lucky man?`` ``J. Alfred Prufrock.`` Inconceivable.

Such was the prejudicial way in which, a dozen years ago, in T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, I tried to catch my sense of this catching, even catchy, yet uncatchable poem. We should all do our best, not least because Eliot truly did his.

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Beyond the Pale


Love heeds not caste nor sleep a broken bed. I went in search of love and lost myself.--Hindu Proverb.

A MAN should, whatever happens, keep his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black. Then, whatever trouble falls is in the ordinary course of things--neither sudden, alien nor unexpected.
This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society, and paid for it heavily.

He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the second. He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never do so again.

Deep away in the heart of the City behind Jitha Megji`s bustee, lies Amir Nath`s Gully, which ends in a dead-wall pierced by one grated window. At the head of the Gully is a big cowbyre, and the walls on either side of the Gully are without windows. Neither Suchet Singh nor Gaur Chand approve of their women-folk looking into the world. If Durga Charan had been of their opinion he would have been a happier man today, and little Bisesa would have been able to knead her own bread. Her room looked out through the grated window into the narrow dark Gully where sun never came and where the buffaloes wallowed in the blue slime. She was a widow, about fifteen years old, and she prayed the Gods, day and night, to send her a lover; for she did not approve of living alone.

One day, the man--Trejago his name was--came into Amir Nath`s Gully on an aimless wandering; and, after he had passed the buffaloes, stumbled over a big heap of cattle-food.

Then he saw that the Gully ended in a trap, and heard a little laugh from behind the grated window. It was a pretty little laugh, and Trejago, knowing that, for all practical purposes, the old Arabian Nights are good guides, went forward to the window, and whispered that verse of ``The Love Song of Har Dyal`` which begins:

Can a man stand upright in the face of the naked Sun; or a Lover in the Presence of his Beloved?
If my feet fail me, O Heart of my Heart, am I to blame, being blinded by the glimpse of your beauty?
There came the faint tchink of woman`s a bracelets from behind the grating, and a little voice went on with the song at the fifth verse:
Alas! alas! Can the Moon tell the Lotus of her love when the Gate of Heaven is shut and the clouds gather for the rains?
They have taken my Beloved, and driven her with the pack-horses to the North.
There are iron chains on the feet that were set on my heart.

Call to the bowmen to make ready--
The voice stopped suddenly, and Trejago walked out of Amir Nath`s Gully, wondering who in the world could have capped ``The Love Song of Har Dyal`` so neatly.

Next morning, as he was driving to office, an old woman threw a packet into his dog-cart. In the packet was the half of a broken glass-bangle, one flower of the blood-red dhak, a pinch of bhusa or cattle-food, and eleven cardamoms. That packet was a letter--not a clumsy compromising letter, but an innocent unintelligible lover`s epistle.

Trejago knew far too much about these things, as I have said. No Englishman should be able to translate object-letters. But Trejago spread all the trifles on the lid of his office-box and began to puzzle them out.

A broken glass-bangle stands for a Hindu widow all India over; because, when her husband dies, a woman`s bracelets are broken on her wrists. Trejago saw the meaning of the little bit of the glass. The flower of the dhak means diversely ``desire,`` ``come,`` ``write,`` or ``danger,`` according to the other things with it. One cardamom means ``jealousy``; but when any article is duplicated in an object-letter, it loses its symbolic meaning and stands merely for one of a number indicating time, or if incense, curds, or saffron be sent also, place. The message ran then--``A willow-- dhak flower and bhusa,--at eleven o`clock.`` The pinch of bhusa enlightened Trejago.

He saw--this kind of letter leaves much to instinctive knowledge--that the bhusa referred to the big heap of cattle-food over which he had fallen in Amir Nath`s Gully, and that the message must come from the person behind the grating; she being a widow. So the message ran then--``A widow, in the Gully in which is the heap of bhusa, desires you to come at eleven o`clock.``

Trejago threw all the rubbish into the fireplace and laughed. He knew that men in the East do not make love under windows at eleven in the forenoon, nor do women fix appointments a week in advance. So he went, that very night at eleven, into Amir Nath`s Gully, clad in a boorka, which cloaks a man as well as a woman. Directly the gongs of the City made the hour, the little voice behind the grating took up ``The Love Song of Har Dyal`` at the verse where the Panthan girl calls upon Har Dyal to return. The song is really pretty in the Vernacular. In English you miss the wail of it. It runs something like this--

Alone upon the housetops, to the North
I turn and watch the lightning in the sky,--
The glamour of thy footsteps in the North
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
Below my feet the still bazar is laid
Far, far, below the weary camels lie,--
The camels and the captives of thy raid
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
My father`s wife is old and harsh with years,
And drudge of all my father`s house am I.--
My bread is sorrow and my drink is tears,
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!

As the song stopped, Trejago stepped up under the grating and whispered--``I am here.``
Bisesa was good to look upon.

That night was the beginning of many strange things, and of a double life so wild that Trejago to-day sometimes wonders if it were not all a dream. Bisesa, or her old handmaiden who had thrown the object-letter, had detached the heavy grating from the brick-work of the wall, so that the window slid inside, leaving only a square of raw masonry into which an active man might climb.
In the daytime, Trejago drove through his routine of office-work, or put on his calling-clothes and called on the ladies of the Station; wondering how long they would know him if they knew of poor little Bisesa. At night, when all the City was still, came the walk under the evil-smelling boorka, the patrol through Jitha Megji`s bustee, the quick turn into Amir Nath`s Gully between the sleeping cattle and the dead walls, and then, last of all, Bisesa, and the deep, even breathing of the old woman who slept outside the door of the bare little room that Durga Charan allotted to his sister`s daughter. Who or what Durga Charan was, Trejago never inquired; and why in the world he was not discovered and knifed never occurred to him till his madness was over, and Bisesa . . . But this comes later.

Bisesa was an endless delight to Trejago. She was as ignorant as a bird; and her distorted versions of the rumors from the outside world that had reached her in her room, amused Trejago almost as much as her lisping attempts to pronounce his name--``Christopher.`` The first syllable was always more than she could manage, and she made funny little gestures with her rose-leaf hands, as one throwing the name away, and then, kneeling before Trejago, asked him, exactly as an Englishwoman would do, if he were sure he loved her. Trejago swore that he loved her more than anyone else in the world. Which was true.

After a month of this folly, the exigencies of his other life compelled Trejago to be especially attentive to a lady of his acquaintance. You may take it for a fact that anything of this kind is not only noticed and discussed by a man`s own race but by some hundred and fifty natives as well. Trejago had to walk with this lady and talk to her at the Band-stand, and once or twice to drive with her; never for an instant dreaming that this would affect his dearer, out-of-the-way life. But the news flew in the usual mysterious fashion, from mouth to mouth, till Bisesa`s duenna heard of it and told Bisesa. The child was so troubled that she did the household work evilly, and was beaten by Durga Charan`s wife in consequence.

A week later, Bisesa taxed Trejago with the flirtation. She understood no gradations and spoke openly. Trejago laughed and Bisesa stamped her little feet--little feet, light as marigold flowers, that could lie in the palm of a man`s one hand.

Much that is written about Oriental passion and impulsiveness is exaggerated and compiled at second-hand, but a little of it is true; and when an Englishman finds that little, it is quite as startling as any passion in his own proper life. Bisesa raged and stormed, and finally threatened to kill herself if Trejago did not at once drop the alien Memsahib who had come between them. Trejago tried to explain, and to show her that she did not understand these things from a Western standpoint. Bisesa drew herself up, and said simply--
``I do not. I know only this--it is not good that I should have made you dearer than my own heart to me, Sahib. You are an Englishman. I am only a black girl``- -she was fairer than bargold in the Mint,--``and the widow of a black man.``

Then she sobbed and said--``But on my soul and my Mother`s soul, I love you. There shall no harm come to you, whatever happens to me.``

Trejago argued with the child, and tried to soothe her, but she seemed quite unreasonably disturbed. Nothing would satisfy her save that all relations between them should end. He was to go away at once. And he went. As he dropped out of the window, she kissed his forehead twice, and he walked home wondering.

A week, and then three weeks, passed without a sign from Bisesa. Trejago, thinking that the rupture had lasted quite long enough, went down to Amir Nath`s Gully for the fifth time in the three weeks, hoping that his rap at the sill of the shifting grating would be answered. He was not disappointed.

There was a young moon, and one stream of light fell down into Amir Nath`s Gully, and struck the grating which was drawn away as he knocked. From the black dark, Bisesa held out her arms into the moonlight. Both hands had been cut off at the wrists, and the stumps were nearly healed.

Then, as Bisesa bowed her head between her arms and sobbed, some one in the room grunted like a wild beast, and something sharp--knife, sword, or spear,--thrust at Trejago in his boorka. The stroke missed his body, but cut into one of the muscles of the groin, and he limped slightly from the wound for the rest of his days.

The grating went into its place. There was no sign whatever from inside the house,-- nothing but the moonlight strip on the high wall, and the blackness of Amir Nath`s Gully behind.

The next thing Trejago remembers, after raging and shouting like a madman between those pitiless walls, is that he found himself near the river as the dawn was breaking, threw away his boorka and went home bareheaded.

* * * * *

What was the tragedy--whether Bisesa had, in a fit of causeless despair, told everything, or the intrigue had been discovered and she tortured to tell; whether Durga Charan knew his name and what became of Bisesa--Trejago does not know to this day. Something horrible had happened, and the thought of what it must have been, comes upon Trejago in the night now and again, and keeps him company till the morning. One special feature of the case is that he does not know where lies the front of Durga Charan`s house. It may open on to a courtyard common to two or more houses, or it may lie behind any one of the gates of Jitha Megji`s bustee. Trejago cannot tell. He cannot get Bisesa--poor little Bisesa--back again. He has lost her in the City where each man`s house is as guarded and as un knowable as the grave; and the grating that opens into Amir Nath`s Gully has been walled up.

But Trejago pays his calls regularly, and is reckoned a very decent sort of man.
There is nothing peculiar about him, except a slight stiffness, caused by a riding-strain, in the right leg.


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The love song of Har Dyal
Text by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), from ``Beyond the Pale`` in Plain Tales from the Hills, published 1888.

Alone upon the housetops to the North
I turn and watch the lightning in the sky,
The glamour of thy footsteps in the North.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!

Below my feet the still bazar is laid,
Far, far below the weary camels lie,
The camels and the captives of thy raid.
Come back, Beloved, or I die!

My father`s wife is old and harsh with years,
And drudge of all my father`s house am I.
My bread is sorrow and my drink is tears.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!

____________________________________

From The Daily Dawn today:

Ulema furious at Poet Ahmad Faraz: ISLAMABAD, May 17: Qazi Zainul Abideen, head of the Motamar al-Alam al-Islami mosque in Islamabad, accused Faraz of distorting the spirit of Islam. Faraz made the remarks in an interview in the paper that focused on a raging controversy in the literary community of the country on the drinking habits and lifestyles of its notables. Faraz defended ``drinking in moderation``.

....... i can`t take it anymore ..... maybe i am getting senile and loosing the ability to comprehend fine writing ....... if so, it is the third thing to go and i might as well put an end to this miserable existence

Inkling dear...have no...:)

...confession...

...things that did not go well with me...formatting...and more importantly the name...could not associate ‘Seema” with a man...and more(... and Seema frying samosa’s at his mother’s behest.. . and burning them...burping properly?...the sudden appearance of the man...missing punctuation...)

...as I said earlier, Inkling, I tried but have no....:)

...but welcome to Chowk...and please re-visit.

---t

Inkling, if i may intrude for a sec...

To all Karachiwalay:

check out apnakarachi.com

Brilliant, beautiful, and very touching.

i wish inkling was a little less cryptic for the benefit of less `sophisticated` readers such as myself and others who are afraid to admit it.