The Following Story

A teacher of Dutch–well, if you wanted to draw a cartoon of the type, you could take him as your model.
Teaching children the language they were already hearing in the echo chamber of the womb long before they
were born, and stunting the natural growth of that language with tedious drivel about ordinal numbers, double possessives,
split infinitives, predicate nouns, and prepositional phrases is bad enough, but to look like an underdone cutlet and
pontificate about poetry, that’s too much. And not only did he lay down the law about poetry, he wrote it too. Every
few years he would spawn yet another anemic assembly of messages from the lukewarm provinces of his soul: toothless lines,
strings of words casting aimlessly about on the page. If they ever happened to brush against a single line of Horace,
they would disintegrate without a trace.

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