The trouble between Sue Weaver and me began just a few months after I met the Weavers. She said to me, "You know you don't have to go on reading and learning. You know enough already for the rest of your life." I was twenty-two years old when she said that to me, and I couldn't believe at first that that was what she had said and that she meant it. I made her repeat it, then I said, "Really, I don't agree at all." And Bill who was sitting nearby said to her,"He does not believe you." And so for the rest of her life I mistrusted and maybe in a way despised her.
But finally, in my fifties, I began in some measure to believe that I had learned a few things and could relax somewhat the iron rule of the relentless inner task-master. Sometime in the middle nineties of the last century, my friend Robert Farrar invited me to join him in watching a new version of Marlowe's Edward II, which I had never seen before. To my surprise and delight I found that I understood it perfectly at first hearing. And there were a couple of similarly surprising incidents in 1999 and the few years after that that I was at university. The first gratifying surprise was walking into a 300-level French poetry class, cold, not having spoken French for almost forty years, and finding that my constant reading in French over all those years had paid off: I understood everything, and had no trouble speaking it. Then there were several essays in French that my instructors wrote at the top of, "Vous ecrivez un francais presque parfait," and one, an analysis of La Symphonie Pastorale, that my instructor, a Cameroonian, wrote at the top of,"une belle analyse dans un style charmant, A+" And there was the time in a French fairy tale class, when the instructor, a Parisian, read a page from a letter of Diderot to his mistress Sophie Volland, and I understood every word. And there was the time when, having experienced the wonder of Giambattista Tiepolo's ceiling paintings in Venice, I travelled to Würzburg to see the finest ceiling painting in the world over the staircase/entry hall in the Prince-Bishop's Residenz, about which I knew nothing beforehand, but immediately I laid eyes on it I recognized to be an allegory of the Four Corners of the World; I could see "America" and "Europe (France, Spain, and Germany)" and "the Orient" as plainly as if they all had stickers on them.