You see, when death is in question, when one speaks to or of the dead, then the Latin comes in force; it is, so to say, the official language. So then you see that death is a thing apart. But it isn’t a humanistic gesture, speaking Latin in honour of death; and the Latin isn’t what you learn at school, either⁠—the spirit of it is quite different, one might almost say hostile. It is ecclesiastical Latin, monkish Latin, medieval dialect, a sort of dull, monotonous, underground chanting. Settembrini has no use for it, it is nothing for humanists and republicans and suchlike pedagogues, it comes from quite another point of the compass. I find one ought to be clear about these two intellectual trends, or perhaps it would be better to say states of mind: I mean the devout and the freethinking. They both have their good sides; what I have against Settembrini’s⁠—the freethinking line⁠—is that he seems to imagine it has a corner in human dignity. That’s exaggerated, I consider, because the other has its own kind of dignity too, and makes for a tremendous lot of decorum and correct bearing and uplifting ceremony; more, in fact, than the freethinking, when you remember it has our human infirmity and proneness to err directly in mind, and thoughts of death and decay play such an important role in it. Have you seen