Adso, of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose fame, upon seeing the great stone door of the abbey for the first time, thought, and then later wrote, these words:

And beneath the feet of the ancients, and arched over them and over the throne and over the tetramorphic group, arranged in symmetrical bands, barely distinguishable one from another because the artist's skill had made them all so mutually proportionate, united their variety and varied in their apt assembly, in wondrous congruency of the parts with the delightful sweetness of hues, miracle of consonance and concord of voices amoung themselves dissimilar, a company arrayed like the strings of the zither, consentient and conspiring continued cognition through deep and interior force suited to perform univocally in the same alternating play of the equivocal, decoration and collage of creatures beyond reduction to vicissitudes and to vicissitudes reduced, work of amourous connecting sustained by a law at once heavenly and worldly (bond and stable nexus of peace, love, virtue, regimen, power, order, origin, life, light, splendor, species, and figure), numerous and resplendent equality through the shining of the form over the proportionate parts of the material--there, all the flowers and leaves and vines and bushes and corymbs were entwined, of all the grasses that adorn the gardens of earth and heaven, violet, cystus, thyme, lily, privet, narcissus, taro, acanthus, mallow, myrrh, and Mecca balsam.

Is it even possible to see and to speak of such things anymore, in this day and age? The art of the written word as it was ceases to be almost entirely. Pamela Anderson is writing books; volume after volume of, indeed, trite albeit occasionally poetic nothings are manufactured and then put up for sale and then destroyed. Do you know how many people have come up to me and said, 'Nora Roberts is a really good writer,'? That almost inspires rage in me. Not at the time, and not entirely directed at that person themselves, but now, in retrospect does it make me rather furious. Only because I read things like The Name of the Rose, and I read words like that, and I remember, or rather, it is that much easier for me to imagine, a time when words were all we had. When language held so much more pith than as now, wherein it acts as more of a segway to events, rather than as a force all on it's own, in and of itself.

I shed a tear for mankind, you betcha I do.

Also, I have made it my immediate life's work to learn how to speak French. I already have a basic understanding of the language, I'm 1/3 of the way there! And then? Ooooh man, you better believe Latin. Maybe not, like, you know, in a couple months or anything. Or like even a couple years. BY THE TIME I'M 30, yeah. Yeah that sounds good. I'll know how to speak French and Latin by the time I'm 30. Mmm-hm.

... So, uh, Laurimus, Illustrious D... French lessons are yes?