As, many times, motive is inaccessible, must we get used to the art of the 
          plausible, and let live? And thrive as prats do on chat shows, toasting 
          each other in bat juice, and coasting?
I would not encourage others of my late age to be always handling a ­proximity-
          fuse of indignant rage to demonstrate the art of self harming. Keep 
          counsel, stay charming, I now advise.
Politics and law back then—Age of Milton, I mean—were visceral; poetry 
          not; though republicans read the Pharsalia, inter alia, and imitated 
          it a lot. To Lucan, indeed, “viscera” was a word forty or more times 
          taken up, buzzing the era.
Coriolanus worked best by being intravenous; no great effusion of plaudits, 
          then, for that particular manifest. It could entertain, sustain, its mean
          -ing by means subterrane. It came to the surface, for instance, in Paris 
          in the nineteen thirties, rendering each clangorous scene timely and 
          dangerous.