Afterword
‘I
f a thing is worth doing’, said G. K. Chesterton, ‘it’s worth
doing badly.’^1 His brilliant reversal of common sense cap-
tures an important truth. Something intrinsically worthwhile
for us to accomplish remains worthwhile, however imperfectly
we carry it through. This thought has sustained me in writing
these pages, which in the end have done so much less than I ini-
tially hoped they might. In closing I want to stress again the mes-
sage of the Preface that none of the advice given here should
necessarily be applied, still less adopted, in a mechanical or
‘handbook’ way. This book offers only suggestions, to be consid-
ered, evaluated, perhaps tried out, amended or discarded, as
seems useful for your own situation and purposes. As Nietzche
recognized: ‘Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books
included, more than he [or she] already knows. What one has no
access to through experience one has no ear for.’^2
There is a final danger, a risk of misconstruction that I want
to underscore. This book tries to partially condense a set of
practices which to a large extent must still be lived to be fully
appreciated. It is, in short, a ‘crib’ book, of which Michael
Oakeshott once remarked: ‘Now the character of a crib is that
its author must have an educated man’s [or woman’s] knowl-
edge of the language, that he must prostitute his genius (if he
has any) as a translator, and that it is powerless to save the igno-
rant reader from all possibility of mistake.’^3 Most of us will
know the sinking feeling of making a transition from the appar-
ent simplicities of a phrase book to an actual conversation in a
foreign language. So let me stress that moving between these
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