The Last Samurai

This was the kind of thing a recent President of the United States (like Denver, a genuinely nice guy) had tended to say, and as there was no point thinking about his particular way of bringing value to the life of others I thought it was a good time to take a break and read Iliad 16. I had been typing for five or six hours so it was a good day so far.

Iliad 16 is the book where Patroclus is killed—he goes into battle wearing Achilles’ armour to encourage the Greeks & unnerve the Trojans, since Achilles still refuses to fight. He wins for a while but he goes too far; Apollo makes him dizzy & takes away his armour, & he is wounded by Euphorbus, & then Hector kills him. I had remembered suddenly that Homer addresses Patroclus in the vocative & that it is strangely moving. Unfortunately I could not find Iliad 13–24, I could only find 1–12, so I decided to read Hector & Andromache in Book 6 instead.

As soon as I sat down L came up to look at the book. He stared & stared. He said he couldn’t read any of it. I said that was because it was in Greek & had a different alphabet & he said he wanted to learn it.

The last thing I wanted was to be teaching a 4-year-old Greek.

And now the Alien spoke, & its voice was mild as milk. It said: He’s just a baby. They spend so much time in school—wouldn’t he be better off playing?

I said: Let him wait to be bored in a class like everyone else.

The Alien said: It will only confuse him! It will destroy his confidence! It would be kinder to say no!

The Alien has a long eel-like neck and little reptilian eyes. I put both hands around its throat & I said: Rot in hell.

It coughed & said sweetly: So sorry to intrude. Admirable maternity! All time devoted to infant amelioration. Selflessly devoted!

I said: Shut up.

It said: Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

I said: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

—& I wrote out a little table for him:

& I said: There’s the alphabet.

He looked at the table and he looked at the page.

I said: It’s perfectly simple. As you can see a lot of the letters are the same as the ones you already know.

He looked at the table and he looked at the page and he looked at the table.

The Alien said: He is only four

Mr. Ma said: Coupez la difficulté en quatre

I said patiently:

I said patiently a lot of things which it would try my patience even more to repeat. I hope I am as ready as the next person to suffer for the good of others, and if I knew for a fact that even 10 people this year, next year or a thousand years from now would like to know how one teaches a 4-year-old Greek I hope I would have the decency to explain it. As I don’t know this I think I will set this aside for the moment. L seems to be transferring Odyssey 5 word by word to pink file cards.

Odyssey 6.

Odyssey 7.

Emma was as good as her word and I was as good as my word.

In the summer of 1985 I began working as a secretary in a small publishing house in London which specialised in dictionaries and non-academic works of scholarship. It had an English dictionary that had first come out in 1812 and been through nine or ten editions and sold well, and a range of technical dictionaries for native speakers of various other languages that sold moderately well, and a superb dictionary of literary Bengali which was full of illustrative material and had no rival and hardly sold at all. It had a two-volume history of sugar, and a three-volume survey of London doorknockers (supplement in preparation), and various other books which gradually built up a following by word of mouth. I did not want to be a secretary & I did not particularly want to get into publishing, but I did not want to go back to the States.

Emma was really the next worst thing to the States. She loved America in the way that the Victorians loved Scotland, French Impressionists Japan. She loved an old Esso station on a state highway in a pool of light with a round red Coca-Cola sign swinging in the wind, and a man on a horse thinking vernacular thoughts among scenes of spectacular natural beauty, and a man in a fast car on a freeway in LA. She loved all the books I’d been made to read at school, and she loved the books we didn’t read in school because they might be offensive to born-again Baptists. I did not know what to say.