Well, it's sobering and encouraging to see that the mock-professorial tone doesn't get up absolutely everyone's nose and that there are people on the board capable of graceful and gracious responses to this sort of thing.
A funny little detail in the same connection, by the way: Hans Wollschlaeger - who died a couple of years ago and was probably, globally, the very last intellectual of the sort who could REALLY be a pain in the ass in that grand style in which early-twentieth-century know-it-alls like Theodor Adorno and Qian Zhongshu could be pains in the ass - was pontificating, in his last years, to an Austrian journalist on the difficulty of writing great literature in a world in which "that one book which bears the awesome and simple appellation of 'The Book' has ceased to form the implicitly universally-shared foundation and presupposition for all inter-personal communication".
The Austrian, who was quite as clever as Wollschlaeger but handicapped in such situations by a sense of humor, put an unplanned early end to the interview by interjecting at this point the helpful exegetic remark:
"Ah yes, the good old Encyclopaedia Britannica..."
