The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these, it might have been.

I said that it seemed very quaint that in England books were in English & in France they were in French and that in 2,000 years this would seem as quaint as Munchkinland & the Emerald City, in the meantime it was strange that people from all over the world would go to one place to breed a nation of English writers & another to breed writers of Spanish, it was depressing in a literature to see all the languages fading into English which in America was the language of forgetfulness.

I was glad we weren’t fighting with real swords. If we had been this might have killed me.