Cleaning up notes from the backs of envelopes, matchbooks, and assorted notebooks.


I am a fairly educated person, but not a scholar, and as an educated layman I do quite a lot of reading. But when reading certain authors I run into a macaronic tendency to drag in untranslated quotations. This is an annoying carryover from the days when educated people were expected to know Latin, Greek and a few modern languages like French and German.

Aside from a smattering of Spanish I have none of these languages, and I daresay that few of my contemporaries do either. Its time to start translating quotations, if only in footnotes. Leaving them untranslated has become de trop.

***

In Paris, when the War was over, Albert Camus, having seen both Nazis and Communists close up, defied democracy as that regime created and sustained by those who know that they do not know everything.