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Reading

Please read the Prologue, Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four and the Author’s Epilogue in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Please stick to the Penguin Edition because the language is modernized and the text is unabridged. When you have read the assigned sections, please try to answer the following questions. At the end of the questions section, I will provide sample answers to all the questions – so you should never feel lost. If a question or answer confuses you, that’s what your tutor is there for, so feel free to contact them. The answers I’ve provided will be interpretive ones, so don’t think that you always need to agree with me. You are allowed to have a mind of your own.

Questions to Consider:

1. What is historically important about the form of the Decameron?

2. How do the stories change, as Boccaccio gets more comfortable with the new genre in which he is writing? What can this tell you about Boccaccio’s intent?

3. What is interesting about Boccaccio as the narrator of these stories? In other words, does he just tell the story?

4. What’s so unusual about Boccaccio’s introduction to the First Day?

5. What does the conversation of the women in the Introduction to the First Day tell you about Boccaccio’s approach to human nature?

6. How do we know that Boccaccio is drawing on the tradition of the troubadours and upon the language and literature of chivalry?

7. How do we know that Boccaccio is not simply being a bawdy or pornographic writer, as some of his critics suggest?

8. What does Boccaccio mean by NATURE?

9. Why does Boccaccio hold the preaching friars, i.e. the Benedictines and Franciscans, in such contempt?

10. What would Boccaccio say, do you think, to a serious religious person who argued that his emphasis on sexuality and earthly things was damaging to the soul?

11. What is the relevance of the garden in Boccaccio’s writing? What does that tell you about his view of NATURE?

12. In addition to the gardens, what is interesting about Boccaccio’s description of the country estate where the tales in the Decameron are told?

13. How do we know we are out of the heavenly or chivalric world and into a more real world in the First Story of the First Day?

14. What new characters does Boccaccio introduce to the literary scene? Why do we need to be careful about drawing simplistic conclusions about this innovation?

15. Who are some of the characters and villains of Florentine society?

16. What does Boccaccio’s praise of intelligence signify?

17. How does Boccaccio unfold his explicitly sexual agenda in The Decameron?

18. What is the significance of characters like Bergamino in the Seventh Story of the First Day?

19. What bourgeois or capitalist value does Boccaccio condemn or “puncture” in the Eighth Story of the First Day?

20. What role does Boccaccio give to women in The Decameron? What role does he condemn?

21. What novel thing does Boccaccio have to say about the ‘NATURE’ of women in the Second Story of the Second Day?

22. What is the key unifying principle of the stories on the Second Day? How do we know that Boccaccio is more indebted to the medieval tradition than to the humanist tradition in his choice of literary themes?

23. Why is Fortune so problematic in Boccaccio’s world?

24. What is significant about the Fifth Story of the Second Day?

25. In what ways is Madonna Beritola ( Sixth Story, Second Day) a modern character?

26. What is the significance of her son Giannotto in the same story?

27. How does the Seventh Story of the Second Day provide a contrast to these abstract aristocratic ideals of love?

28. In the Eight Story of the Second Day, the wife of the King’s son delivers a seductive speech to the Count of Antwerp. What is the speech’s significance? How does the Ninth Story reinforce/contradict this conclusion?

29. How is the tale of Messer Ricciardo di Chinzica (Tenth Story, Second Day) closer to Boccaccio’s theory of sexuality and human nature?

30. What is the overall tone of the “Introduction” to the Third Day? How does this contribute to the development of literary realism?

31. Is the First Story of the Third Day just another one of Boccaccio’s anti-clerical satires, by turning nuns into horny women?

32. How is the initial passion of sexual attraction different from the passion of love (Second Story, Third Day)?

33. How does Boccaccio describe Florence, in the Third Story of the Third Day? What can this tell you about his discussion of ‘intelligence’?

34. What other characteristic does Boccaccio routinely associate with lovemaking, apart from sexual satisfaction (Fourth Story, Third Day).

35. Why doesn’t Boccaccio recommend free love, if he thinks that sexuality is so ‘natural’ (Fifth Story, Third Day)?

36. What is the most important virtue for the elite love makers of Boccaccio’s Florence or Naples (Sixth Story, Third Day)?

37. How does the character Tedaldo (Seventh Story, Third Day) prefigure more modern realistic characters? How does he differ from them?

38. What revealing thing does Boccaccio say about the growing length of his stories in the Eighth Story of the Third Day?

39. Did you discover anything interesting in the story of the Abbot delivering a sleeping potion to Ferondo in the same story?

40. Are there any other elements in this long story that you find interesting in terms of the development of realistic literature?

41. What is the significance of the character Gillette in the Ninth Story of the Third Day?

42. Why does the narrator take over in the introduction to the Fourth Day?

43. What is the theme of the Fourth Day and how does it fit in with Boccaccio’s realistic agenda?

44. What is the modern moral lesson of the sad tale of Ghismonda (First Story, Fourth Day)?

45. It is easy to overlook the brilliance of the Second Story on the Third Day. How is this story of Friar Alberto different from either a bawdy tale, anti-clerical romp, or a simple farce leading to a moral lesson?

46. What new passion, other than sexual, does Boccaccio introduce in the Third Story of the Third Day? How does he describe this passion? What is interesting about that?

47. In this same story, Boccaccio mentions the age of three young females about to elope with their lovers. Do you find anything interesting in that?

48. What is the extent of the mental life of Boccaccio’s characters, as demonstrated for example in the Fourth Story on the Fourth Day?

49. How does Boccaccio show us that his love stories originated in the songs of the medieval troubadours?

50. Why is the discussion of dreaming in the Sixth Story of the Fourth Day not a modern literary device?

51. Despite the fact that Boccaccio’s comic tales contain more realistic elements than his tragic ones, the latter still provide some realistic gems. Can you find any in the Sixth and Seventh Stories of the Fourth Day?

52. What does Boccaccio suggest are his achievements in the Author’s Epilogue to The Decameron?

53. How does Boccaccio deal with the criticism that he is corrupting young people?

54. What, for Boccaccio, is the primary purpose of literature, and how does he differ from his medieval and humanist contemporaries?

55. Why does Boccaccio believe that it is a difficult art to capture the reality of everyday life?

56. What it Boccaccio’s ultimate retort to those who criticize him for being anti-clerical and mocking religious leaders? What does that say about him?

Possible or Suggested Answers:

1. It is the first serious and sophisticated literary work in prose. Before this, any serious narrative – like the epic – took a poetic form.

2. Many of the stories get longer. Length is key because it allows Boccaccio to introduce realistic details and to develop his characters as realistic individuals. He does not always do this, of course, and many of his stories are really just introductions to punch lines or mini moral lessons. But the longer stories are much more highly dramatic and sharply delineated.

3. Boccaccio comes out from behind the persona of narrator on a number of occasions: in the introduction to the first day, in the introduction to day four, and in the author’s epilogue. Thus, we get to learn something about him and his motives, particularly his agenda with respect to love.

4. Boccaccio describes the bubonic plague and its effects upon Florentine society very extensively. The realistic detail or verisimilitude is accentuated by the fact that Boccaccio even tells us he could give the “actual names” of the people involved. The descriptions of the boils on the bodies and the trenches crammed with corpses show that we are in the domain of reality. As a literary technique, the horror of the plague contrasts with the idyllic setting of young escapees and their more trivial pursuits. Even so, the realistic detail continues to flow in the description of their doings and some of their tales.

5. Boccaccio has his women call themselves “fickle, quarrelsome, suspicious, cowardly, and easily frightened.” While this is clearly an anti-feminist medieval stereotype, it clearly suggests that Boccaccio is going to explore human nature in all its realistic messiness. In many, but not all, ways, Boccaccio’s characters are flesh and blood people. They are not the ideal types portrayed in chivalric literature, where women are paragons of virtue and elegance.

   Boccaccio relies on the chivalric genre, which idealizes and sanitizes love, but his characters are real people who love gossip, smutty jokes, are worldly and urbane, and have distinctive faults.

6. The Days typically end with a troubadour’s song about love. Some of the stories are classic tales of love. Courtly and noble values, such as honour, fidelity, chastity etc., are affirmed in the stories. They are, however, undercut by more humorous worldly stories of love, where adultery is common and even approved, where it is o.k. to manipulate virgins into bed, where women love to get laid, and where sexual pleasure and its description are extremely graphic.

7. First, Boccaccio clothes his tales in a sophisticated literary from that suggests that he takes his subject matter seriously. Second, Boccaccio constantly defends his tales as: 1) things that elegant people do talk about; 2) something that can be made respectable with elegant language; and, most important, 3) episodes that conform to human “NATURE”.

8. He means human nature, specifically our sexual passions?

9. Not only does Boccaccio think that these people are hypocrites, but he considers them dangerous because their agenda is to turn people into asexual beings. By preaching against sexuality, the preaching friars are going against human nature.

10. This is a difficult question to answer, because Boccaccio almost never takes religious arguments at their face value. He seems to think that most religious are deluded, hypocritical or manipulative. When he talks about life after death – as he does with respect to lovers who have died – he appears to regard it as uncertain. He certainly does not subscribe to medieval religious values and the world that he creates is the here and now of earthly existence that we should enjoy before we get old and die.

11. Boccaccio’s gardens are elegant, tame, idyllic gathering places where humans can recreate away from the busy city. Despite the detailed description, these are clearly humanly contrived settings where Human Nature, especially in the form of attraction between the sexes, can be explored. NATURE in Boccaccio is always human nature, something that links him to the humanist tradition.

12. Boccaccio gives us details of household management – i.e. how the rooms are appointed and how the servants will manage the meals – that must have interested his patrician readers, but are too trivial for earlier medieval literature. Boccaccio finds every realistic detail of interest and worthy of the telling.

13. We are told right away that the story is “concerned, not with the judgment of God, but with that of men.

14. Merchants and merchants’ wives are key characters in The Decameron. This corresponds to the importance of merchants in contemporary Italian society and the fact that they were involved in the patriciate and mingled with more traditional nobility. This is a fluid society with urban values. But primacy is always given to noble values, even if these are the more earthy ones of honour, generosity, refinement, elegance, breeding, valour etc. Explicitly bourgeois values are given short shrift by Boccaccio. His realism is not that of a bourgeois materialist world, even if there are some elements of that world beginning to appear.

15. In addition to the merchants, we are introduced to the moneylenders, sometimes Jews and sometimes Christians. Moneylenders are necessary in this society, but they tend to be deceitful and need to be treaded with suspicion. Even so, they come off better than the preaching friars who Boccaccio hated. Thus, the First Story shows how a clever and immoral moneylender hoodwinks the friars and transforms himself into a saint.

16. Boccaccio clearly appreciates intelligence, even if it takes the form of cunning and manipulation of others. For him, there appears to be some virtue in being able to outwit others, even if this involves outright deceit. This, of course, is a very different kind of virtue than medieval morality. It is closer to the ideals of the Greeks, who respected cunning. It also fits the kind of moxy that people who live in a complex urban commercial society need if they are going to be able to deal with all the tricksters and con men that are about.

    This helps to explain why Boccaccio really has no time for people who are too naïve, credulous and simpletons. He lampoons them, and when they suffer as a result of their stupidity, he thinks it is their own fault.

17. He moves slowly. Sexual intercourse appears in the Fourth Story of the First Day and all we get is a little bed rocking and expose of copulating friars. The Fifth Story begins with a gentle rebuke of the Fourth Story as unfit for ladies. But over time, the gentle Florentine ladies will stop blushing and get a good laugh from much more explicitly sexual tales. Another technique that Boccaccio uses to introduce more risqué tales is to have one of the storytellers – the last one each day – be given license to break the rules of decorum. Boccaccio clearly understands that he is breaking the rules of serious literature and does so gradually, drawing in and co-opting his readers.

18. These are courtiers and conversationalists – men of education and, hopefully, of breeding – that abounded in Florentine society and played the roles of diplomats, go-betweens, and dinner guests. These characters illuminate a patrician society that is geared around noble entertainments and conspicuous consumptions – very different from a more blunt and sober bourgeois society. Boccacio would have found the latter ‘homespun’ (First Day, Second Story), course and vulgar. Again, although Florence was a commercial society, Boccaccio is anything but a proponent of bourgeois realism.

19. Avarice. Anything smacking of greed was hated by Boccaccio, who counters with the “noble” virtue of generosity.

20. He thinks that women were designed to demonstrate elegant manners and to display the subtleties of their wit? He deplores the fact that too many modern women are obsessed with clothes and make up.

21. He suggests that they are sexual beings with “carnal instincts” like men. He realistically describes the “gleam” in a lady’s eye as she ogles the handsome and debonair Rinaldo. He also shows that women can be deceitful and treacherous if their sexual instincts are thwarted.

22. Fortune. In a world characterized by change, it was only natural that Renaissance writers would describe the ups and downs of Fortune. The biggest difference between a medieval and a humanist point of view was that humanists like Machiavelli thought that something could be done about fortune. Medieval thinkers tended to look upon fortune as something much more unpredictable and something that happened to bring those who had too much wealth and pride back down to earth. Boccaccio’s view is closer to the latter. His characters are buffeted by Fortune, which sometimes works for good and sometimes for ill, but is totally unpredictable.

23. The Italian City States were places where: 1) warfare between princes and nobles was common; 2) violence, piracy and assassination were present everywhere; 3) fortunes were made and lost in trade every day; 4) disease and plague could take one out any minute.

24. It centers on a sexual assignation in the red light (‘Fleshpots’) part of the city and involves a character getting covered in excretion when he falls into the place where people relieved themselves. In essence, this is a crude and bawdy tale. What makes it different is the realistic detail that requires considerable length for Boccaccio to develop. Andreuccio, and the lady who seduces him, are recognizable individuals with their own perspective and strategies. The setting is Naples and is described with affectionate detail with its inns, alleys and dark streets inhabited by crooks and potential executioners. We even read about the wooden beams used as short cuts between buildings and apartment. The plot, or the punch line, of this story does not require this level of detail. In fact, the realistic detail overwhelms the plot, which becomes secondary.

25. She is realistically drawn. Abandoned on an island, she does not maintain her gentility in the medieval fashion. Instead, she turns wild, eats grass, and adopts baby animals that she feeds with her milk.

26. Giannotto is more of a characteristically medieval character. Even though he is thrown in prison for his love, he maintains his “innate nobility” and the speeches that come out of his mouth are elegant and rhetorical. His function in the story, unlike his more realistically drawn mother, is to emphasize the power of love and its victory over adversity. But the love that is described here is hardly sexual.

27. In this story, the sex is the most graphic in the novella to date. The sultan’s daughter learns all about sex from her seven mates. There are multiple references to ‘butting’, erections (Saint Stiffen-in-the-Hand or Hollows), orgasms and the ‘warmth of the bed’, in which the innate sexuality of the Sultan’s daughter is explicitly described. Despite the sexual realism, the realistic details in this very long tale are developed more with respect to the setting and the plot. The sultan’s daughter is only realistic in her sexuality. She is not a realistically developed character. It is interesting to see how Boccaccio varies his realistic technique, sometimes focusing on foreground and sometimes on background, but rarely bringing the two together.

28. She develops Boccaccio’s argument that “the promptings of the flesh and the powers of Love” cannot be denied. When her husband is absent, she needs sex, and is going to get it. What is interesting about the speech is that, as a noblewoman, she feels less guilty in pursuing illicit sex than poor women. The latter, she says, have to earn a living and so need to be more careful than aristocratic women, who can afford to indulge their whims.

    The Ninth Story begins with the suggestion that all women want sex when their husband is away, but the heroine proves superior to these “natural cravings.” In this story, the would-be adulterer is neither successful, nor a hero and is punished for his attempts.

    What is Boccaccio doing here? It is difficult to say. Obviously, he thinks human nature cannot easily be denied. But in cases like adultery, he does believe that there are women and men who are noble enough to control, if not eliminate, their urges. There is a tension here between medieval values and a new realistic attitude towards sex. Boccaccio is working with both genres and sometimes falls between them.

29. Women are just as sexual as men, and an old man with a young woman will prove to be a problem unless he is as virile as she is. There is an implicit argument against arranged marriages here, if these work against the sexual natures of the participants.

30. The tone is relaxed, detailed and ‘unhurried’. This allows the author time to realistically describe the setting that includes a wonderful garden, with hidden culverts deflecting ornamental steams of water that eventually power two separate mills on the estate.

31. No, Boccacio wants to make the point that our human nature as sexual beings cannot be bottled up in convents or monasteries. People will seek out sex whatever their environment and despite the risk of shame or pregnancy. Boccaccio will later criticize anyone who tries to bottle up sexuality – religious authorities, parents, and siblings – because they are perverting human nature.

32. Love is a more complex mental emotion than sexual attraction. If sexual attraction to someone is restricted, it can grow stronger. If it is denied altogether, it can lead the suffering individual to sickness and death. Boccaccio here begins the description of love as a mental attraction and preoccupation; while he doesn’t go very far into the mental life of his characters, he does recognize that such a mental life exists.

33. It is a place where “fraud and cunning prosper more than love or loyalty.” Boccaccio clearly thinks that cleverness, in hothouse environments such as this, is an admirable trait. He also thinks it is o.k. to manipulate members of the opposite sex – even when married – into bed, as long as the goal is mutual happiness. Boccacio, as narrator, even ends this story hoping that he will have similar good fortune in achieving sexual happiness (outside marriage obviously).

34. Laughter. His characters can “shriek with laughter” during and about sex. Laughter is as natural for Boccaccio’s characters and audience as sex. It often takes the form of ridicule of those who are simple, naïve or misguided. Introducing comic situations in serious literature is something new.

35. In a society where marriage was a noble alliance between families, it was important to maintain the fiction of a good reputation. Also, in a courtly society, one had to prove one’s devotion by overcoming obstacles and wooing one’s partner. Finally, Boccaccio believed that it was important not to ‘play around’; while one could have a love affair outside of marriage, it was still important to be “constant in love”.

36. Discretion.

37. He is modern to the extent that his character develops over the course of his adventures and because he “reflects” critically on his society and its “blind values”. He also has some of the most interesting lines in The Decameron i.e., 1) when he argues that adultery should be considered a less serious offence than robbery and assault because it is a “natural sin” an not an anti-social offence; 2) when he argues that man is the noblest creature of God and his sexual love should be respected as a God-given trait. Despite all of this, however, Tedaldo’s inner life is very limited. Primarily, he plays out the social role that he was given and in no way can be imagined as a universal character. Moreover, his primary role in the story is to deliver an anti-clerical tirade for Boccaccio.

38. He argues that, while the stories are long, they are “brief” if one considers the “number and variety of the incidents touched upon.” In other words, Boccaccio is suggesting that the realistic details are not simply padding but add to the richness of the stories.

39. Parts of the plot in this and other Boccaccio stories were borrowed directly by William Shakespeare (the friar and the sleeping potion in Romeo and Juliet). Since Shakespeare is considered by many to be the most important developer of the individual in Western literature, we can posit a direct connection between Boccaccio and the Bard.

40. You might single out lots of things here. I found his use of love slang particularly interesting. Ferondo refers to his wife as “my cheesy-weesy, honey-bunny, sweetie-weetie wife.” Of course, this makes him look like even more of a simpleton, but it is the first example of realistic love slang in serious western literature.

41. She is a fully realized and individual character. She is capable, diligent and determined. She is highly intelligent, able to “build a mental picture of the affair as a whole” and “decide upon her course of action.” She is not a stereotypical woman and, despite the fact that she is in love, she is not a romantic type.

42. Boccaccio is clearly feeling defensive. Some of his stories, not yet published in book form, have been circulating and he is feeling the ‘heat’. His critics are condemning him for adopting a prose (and vernacular style), which is considered to be low. They also think his focus on women and love is trite. The fact that he is clearly upset shows that he is fully aware that he is doing something novel and important. In particular, he thinks that his new perspective on “Nature” is something quite different and important, and a significant challenge to the medieval mindset.

43. The theme is the tragic effects of love, which, ostensibly, allows Boccaccio to elevate some of his sexual vignettes into tales of tragic love. Love being a universal emotion, and a higher form of passion than sexual attraction, it had already contributed mightily to medieval literature in the form of the romance. Boccaccio now has a chance to develop this theme in a prose form.

    He does develop his agenda that we humans are made of flesh and blood rather than religious abstractions. Human passions cannot be chained or diverted from their proper course or there will be trouble. Unfortunately, his romantic characters are rhetorical devices for presenting this message, rather than the more fully realized characters of the less serious tales.

    We now begin to see the intermediate nature of Boccaccio’s novella and its limitations. Boccaccio doesn’t really go much beyond a vaguely sentimental approach to love lost and, when his writing approaches the tragic, its closer to medieval romance than to modern individualistic literature. The realistic tendencies are lost in the ethical and formal considerations that guided medieval literature.

44. Parents shouldn’t divert the course of sexual attraction and love, by insisting on total control over their children and their marriage. Here, Boccaccio is arguing against the aristocratic practice of arranged marriages, at least to the extent that they run up against the passions of principles. He also advances the revolutionary message that merit should also be attached to actions and character rather than simply to blood, breeding and an estate.

45. What is interesting about this story, in the first place, is the unhurried detail that Boccaccio provides about Friar Alberto of Imola. The detail is developed carefully so that we know everything about this shallow character. Similarly, when he plans to deflower Monna Lisetta (Lady Numskull) we see these plans unfold in an unhurried way. While the character of Friar Alberto is not particularly interesting – he is a villain – his planning process is intricate and intriguing. When he finally mounts this naïve lady, Boccaccio provides a level of realistic detail that greatly adds to the sense of the comic. Boccaccio remains unhurried as he introduces the other members of the Florentine community who gradually get in on the joke, and the plot builds slowly. However, when Friar Alberto is exposed and has to jump out of the river and swim for his life, the pace changes dramatically, only to settle down again as Boccaccio brings his villain to justice. Throughout, Boccaccio provides us with topography of Venice and its Canals and its people (who you can’t trust). We travel along with the crowds in the street and feel the commotion that they create. Despite disliking him, we feel the pain of Friar Alberto as the outraged citizens pelt his face with “the nastiest things they can find.”

    Ostensibly, this is a comic tale of an arch villain being brought to justice for his wicked deeds. But the lengthy, pacing and the detail in the story make it a remarkably innovative piece of writing.

46. The passion is anger. Boccaccio describes anger as a sudden impulse that expels reason and sets in motion feelings of resentment. He thinks that anger “burns more fiercely” in women than men. Although Boccaccio is only working on the surface of this emotion here, he is pointing to something wider than sexuality and to the irrational nature of human experience. Boccaccio, like most medieval or humanist writers, is more interested in bottling up the emotion of anger than exploring it in any detail.

47. They are fifteen and fourteen. In another story, a girl about to be married is twelve. There is no appreciation in The Decameron of adolescence preceding maturity. Once girls and men are fertile – they are capable of love. The medieval and humanist perspective does not provide much of a developmental perspective on character and this limits their ability to explore the individual. Most of the changes that take place in the stories are in the environment – where wars, shipwrecks and other catastrophes change the landscape. Inner development or change in characters over time is minimal.

48. The most developed characters either have a strong will or powerful intelligence or both. They are capable of creating “mental pictures” of what they want to do. They are even capable of falling in love with their “mental pictures of the sort of man he was.” This strong and creative imagination, however, is static. Either people have it or they don’t. There is not much depth or growth to these characters. They may be “individuals” but not in the modern sense.

49. He has his young men and young ladies discussing the meaning of a song-about “ill fated love” and its connection to the prose narrative in the Sixth Story of the Fourth Day.

50. In modern writing, dreams are a path into the subconscious mind. Dreams have significance for Boccaccio but, like Fortune, their meaning comes from outside, rather than inside, the person. That is why dreams can be terrifying for the inhabitants of Boccaccio’s world.

51. These might include: 1) the medical description of asphyxia, 2) the description of putting out wool for spinning, 3) rubbing sage leaves on the teeth and gums as a form of dental hygiene, 4) the enormous and venomous toad in the garden.

52. He claims to have presented the language and character of everyday life and speech as with “the brush of a pointer.” He points out that that he has depicted the stories that are most appropriate to the Florentine gardens – those of refined pleasure and humorous entertainment. He claims to have done all this elegantly and in “seemly language,” which had never been done before.

53. First, he suggests that polite people already recount such tails in their gardens. All that he has done has ‘transcribed’ what he heard. Second, he suggests that his tales are so refined that they could not possibly corrupt anyone who was not already corrupted. Finally, he says that he has put headings to each story that, like warning labels, provide an indication of the nature of the story. If people are concerned, they shouldn’t read them.

54. Boccaccio believes that the primary purpose of literature should be to entertain, not to reprove or improve. He also suggests that there is a place for light literature and defends himself in a beautiful pair of sentences: “I have little gravity. On the contrary, I am so light that I float on the surface of water.”

55. He says “the things of this world have no stability, but are subject to constant change, and this may well have happened to my tongue.”

56. He says: “who cares?” His worldview is secular; he doesn’t really care what the religious authorities think about his writings.