Impatiently I jabbed at the Hold-button, not to have to hear another advertisement. Owing to some characteristic of the machinery the gloss Held, but the lecture did not recommence; therefore I depressed Gloss again, and learned of a new dimension in the program: instead of the interrupted advertisement I heard a third voice, energetic and intense, apparently glossing the gloss:
"The Milo incident, and thus the later Enochist epigram, has been variously explained. Philocaster the Younger (in his Commentary on the Actae Cancellorum, Volume Two, pages four thirty-eight ff.) formulates the classical interpretation: 'Excellence is non-departmental' — - that is, greatness is what counts, irrespective of its particular nature. Opposed is the influential little treatise by Yussuf Khadrun, De Vacae in Arbores, which holds that ends, rather than means, are the Examiners' primary concern: that the excellence for which Milo was rewarded lay not in his athletic record but in his radical (and in the final sense practical) solution of an apparently flunking predicament. To the objection that treeing the cow was not a solution of anything until the Chancellor made it so by rewarding it, later Khadrunians have asserted that Milo's victory was not over the problem on its own terms, but over the terms of the problem — - that is to say, over the directive 'Raise this heifer' in its conventional interpretation. As Fanshaw and Smart ask (in The Higher Pragmatism): 'What did the Examiners care about experimental pasturage or the physical well-being of Sophie the heifer? In one sense everything, in another nothing. Milo's bold gesture made his failure the Department's failure. As one of Sakhyan's "footnotes" reminds us, too eager pursuit of solutions may blind us to the Answers, which are at least in some cases to be discovered by strange means indeed, and in strange places.' End of quote…"
I listened amazed. Though the quotation was ended, the gloss-upon-the-gloss evidently was not:
"Hugo Krafft takes a similar stand in his brilliant and exhaustive (if sometimes oppressive) West-Campus Cattle-Barns from Pre-History to the Thirty-Seventh Remusian Chancellory, and, like other semantically oriented interpreters, makes much of Xanthippides's fondness for word-play as a pedagogical device. The Neo-Philocastrians, to be sure, like the Scapulists they derive from, have never sympathized with pragmatism, higher or lower, and are inclined to be skeptical of the close textual analysis made popular by Krafft's followers; in general they still maintain that virtuosity, rather than net achievement, is the key to Commencement Gate — - whether the performance wherein it is manifest be in itself 'admirable' or not. Thus Bongiovanni cites the examples of Carpo the Fool, an early freshman who knocked himself senseless in a fall from the parallel bars and was for some terms thereafter the butt of campus humor, and Gaffer McKeon, 'The Perfect Cheat,' who confessed to never having given an uncribbed answer during his brilliant undergraduate career. Both men passed.
"But the West-Campus Philocastrians identify virtuosity with particular excellencies, while their East-Campus counterparts (if so various a group may be thought of collectively) tend to speak of it with a capital V, as something distinguishable from virtuoso performances. Thus the old East-Campus table-grace quoted by Dharhalal Panda:
With Milo, Carpo, and Gaffer,
I live alone alone:
Four fingers of a hand.
May I, with Sophie or some other thumb,
Grasp Answers as I grasp this food;
Eat Truth; and on the Finals know
I feed myself myself.
"Among the rash of modern researches into the political and economic life of the early West-Campus colleges one finds frequent mention of Milo and the heifer — - for example, in E. J. B. Sundry's scholarly analysis of the old enmity between the Divisions of Agriculture and Athletics in the Lykeionian Academy. Yet while one welcomes new light on studentdom's history from whatever source, one cannot but regret the deprecatory tone of these investigators and the glib iconoclasm especially manifest in their handling of traditional anecdotes. Sundry's suggestion, for example, that Xanthippides saw in 'the Milo affair' an opportunity to '…pull the collective beard of the Ag Hill Lobby [sic}' as a gesture of mollification to Coach Glaucon, who was miffed at the large appropriation for new mushroom-houses, is more exasperating by reason of its partial truth than are plainly lunatic hypotheses (e.g., that the Chancellor's hand was forced, there being no other way to unoak the cow; or that the whole incident was cynically pre-arranged by Milo and the Chancellor, or by the School of Athletics, or by some Lykeionian equivalent to the Office of Public Information, for publicity purposes)."
Surely, I thought, that must end both gloss and gloss-gloss. But the indefatigable scholiast went on to recommend as perhaps the best general work on the whole matter a recently-taped study by one V. Shirodkar, called There Is One Way:
"As the title suggests, Shirodkar approaches 'Khadrunianism' and 'Philoeastrianism' (which is to say, in a special sense, Entelechism and Scapulism) by way of the ambiguity of Xanthippides's famous observation, and he attempts to combine, or at least subsume, the major traditions into what he calls Mystical Pragmatism. The result, alas, is more syncretion than synthesis, but Shirodkar's historico-semantic schema belongs in every undergraduate notebook. Please Hold and Gloss."
Appalled, I did, and from a slot in the console issued, in the form of a printed diagram, this gloss upon the gloss upon the gloss upon Bray's quotation from Enos Enoch's allusion to Xanthippides's remark upon Milo's misdemeanor:
Even as I endeavored to make sense out of the diagram, the Hold-button popped out and the recentest speaker concluded primly:
"Pragmatic Monism, for example, Shirodkar maintains, comes to quite the same thing as Equipollent Pluralism, and Valuational Monism to the same as Disquiparent Pluralism. That this correspondence (which may be merely verbal) is ground for synthesis seems doubtfuclass="underline" the position of the old Lykeionian Sub-Department of Dairy Husbandry may, it is true, be assigned with equal justice either to Negative Valuational Monism or to Negative-Superlative Disquiparent Pluralism; but what meeting of minds can be hoped for between Negative Valuational Monism and Positive Valuational Monism, or between Mystical Monism and any of the others? These secondary and tertiary glosses were prepared by your Sub-Department of Comparative Philosophical History."
I chewed nervously on Shirodkar's historico-semantic schema, waiting to see what would happen next. The Gloss-button popped up and automatically redepressed itself, whereupon the voice of the earlier commentator, the Agricultural-History man, resumed his own conclusion — no advertisement after alclass="underline"