Jean Francois Millet The Gleaners painting

Jean Francois Millet The Gleaners paintingJacques-Louis David Napoleon crossing the Alps paintingJoaquin Sorolla y Bastida Children on the Beach painting
you'd actually given us a unique opportunity. All the texts are corrupt, you know, even these -- copies of copies of copies, full oferrata andlacunae - - but we never could agree on a common reading, and of course the old Scrolls acquired a great spurious authority for sentimental reasons, even though they contradict each other and themselves." At an interdepartmental faculty luncheon that same day, therefore, a committee of experts from various relevant disciplines had been established to reconstruct, from the shards of the Founder's Scroll (actually several scrolls, overlapping, redundant, discrepant), the parent text, until then hypothetical, from which all known variants had descended and on which their authority was ultimately based.
"A radical project, to be sure," said the library-scientist, who was also chairman of thead hoc committee. "But we like to think of ourselves asavant-garde classicists, so to speak. Little paradox there. . ." After a small digression then on the etymology of the wordlacuna, and a more extravagant one on the worddigression (which he justified with the chuckled preface thatdigression andextravagance were "etymological kissing cousins,