The Weekly (Pat) Report #2: The Finale

As often happens with these kinds of things, they just sort of fade away. At least to all outward appearances. After a huge explosion after last Wednesday's post (and it was epic, let me tell you), Pat offered a truce, which covers fixing the things he did but not the things his sister did. As it turns out, his sister is willing to offer her brother up as a sacrifice for a vendetta that isn't hers just because it's fun to do mean things to people (that's a paraphrase of her actual words, not something I'm just saying). Pat, though, is doing his best to counteract what his sister has done, since she's unwilling to retract all of the fake ratings she threw at me.

And that's where it stands and where it will stand unless something else happens. I'm hoping that nothing else happens.

Because this is related, I recently (last week) started reading The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha; you probably know it better simply as Don Quixote, but I just love the full title. Now, just in case you don't know, this book is 400 years old and is one of the first examples of a novel in Western literature. Yet, in the prologue to the book, Cervantes felt compelled to write the following:

Idle reader, you need no oath of mine to convince you that I wish this book, the child of my brain, were the handsomest, the liveliest, and the wisest that could be conceived. ...if a father should happen to sire an ugly and ill-favored child, the love he bears it claps a bandage over his eyes and so blinds him to its faults that he reckons them as talents and graces and cites them to his friends as examples of wit and elegance. But I, who appear to be Don Quixote's father, am in reality his stepfather and do not intend to follow the usual custom, nor to beg you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to pardon or dissemble the faults you may see in this child of mine. You are no kinsman or friend of his; ...all of which exempts and frees you from every respect and obligation. So you may say what you please about this story without fear of being backbitten for a bad opinion or rewarded for a good one.

So... There you go. 400 years ago, Cervantes was saying, "Review the thing however you want to. Be honest. You won't get a response from me one way or the other." Evidently, he was the exception in his time period, not the rule.

I suppose this is just an example of how people don't really change all that much. 400 years later, we're still struggling with the concept of allowing people to honestly receive our work.