I started telling N about a course on Mark Twain I took as an undergrad at McGill.
“I don’t know why anybody would take such a course,” he said sleepily. “One could just get the books out of the library and read them.”
I almost fell off the bed when I heard that.
“Well,” I responded, brimming over with righteous indignation, “I have no idea why anybody would pay a huge salary to a statistician when one can just as easily count things on a calculator.”
“You can’t do what I do just by using a calculator,” he explained.
“And you can’t substitute what I do in class by taking books out of a library!”
Can you believe that, folks? I have failed at educating my own husband about the importance of literary criticism. I feel like a series of lectures at the home front is in order.