I have recently embarked on a campaign to civilize the natives who live on my land—that is to say, my children—with a program of collective prayer and improving reading. (Reading aloud; the natives remain illiterate.) We have started Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, one of the few children’s books I have read more than once as an adult. The genteel life and manners of the river-bankers will, I think, prove an ideal introduction to the pleasures of settled existence for these savage peoples.
As a rule, I dislike the game I think of as “interpretation unto fanfic”—finding your pet subjects in a text and coming up with extravagant explanations justifying why they are there. English-speaking Catholics, who are aliens in their own tongue, tend to be especially guilty of this; in certain quarters, the theory that Billy Shakes was a Catholic persists on pretty thin evidence. (Do you really think the man who wrote King John had anything but unsophisticated Anglican feelings about praemunire?)
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